CS373 Spring 2021: Jack Raney (Week 3)

What did you do this past week?

• This past week I focused on knocking out our first project on Collatz. It wasn’t too bad, I finished much faster than I had expected. All I need to do now is write a few additional test cases and submit it.

What’s in your way?

• Really nothing at this point, I had originally thought the project was due Monday night but realized today that we have until Tuesday, so I have more time than I had planned. This is a good thing, but I procrastinated pretty bad once I found that out :)

What will you do next week?

• This upcoming week I plan on finishing up the little work I have on Collatz by the end of Monday. I’ll then direct most of my attention for the week to finishing up my Networks assignment. I need to create an event-based server and I am not familiar at all with events so there will be a lot of learning there.

If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?

• The idea behind continuous integration just seems very efficient. The Collatz project is really the first project I’ve had that emphasized these kind of development practices. Its definitely something that takes some getting used to, but I can see it being invaluable in team software development.

What was your experience of Collatz?

• I found Collatz to be very interesting conceptually. I love the idea of these problems where we pretty sure that we understand the behavior, but we can’t prove it. Collatz was a fun project because it really highlighted how these kind of deeper observations can lead to optimizations. Also, its always fun to have a reminder of just how awesome caching is.

What was your experience of exceptions?

• I haven’t played around much with exceptions in the past. However, I’m not wholly unfamiliar with them. I am convinced however that they’re an important tool that I should try to use more often in the future.

What made you happy this week?

• Well, we take small wins where we can get them. My internet at my apartment has been very spotty for about a week and a half now. They finally fixed it on Friday, so I was very very happy about that.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

• VirtualBox is a really cool bit of software that enables the easy use of virtual machines. I have a Windows machine, and since using Linux I find it very hard to do programming work on Windows. So for the Collatz project I ran a Linux VM using VirtualBox and then inside the VM I downloaded Docker and ran the Docker container inside of that Linux VM. I had a virtual environment running inside of a virtual environment! Its virtualization all the way down!